Author: Alper Tonga

Alper Tonga is a Lean/Agile experimenter, KU certified Accredited Kanban Trainer and Kanban Management Professional, public speaker, and happiness-at-work advocate from Turkey. He is a strong follower of visual documentation and predictive planning methods such as; mind maps, user story mapping, Monte-Carlo simulations. Uses historical data to forecast project outcomes and boost team awareness. He believes aiding decision making process with mathematics is much better than just following instincts. Also, it is harder to argue. Alper Tonga has a BSc degree in Electrical Engineering received from Missouri University of Science & Technology. He has been professionally involved in multinational defence and IT projects more than 14 years as a developer, systems engineer (INCOSE), and program manager. Although he has been applying and using lean and agile principles in his work and personal life, his professional coaching and organizational transformation career started in 2012. In 2016, his work on lean transformation which presented improvements seen on team level (proto-kanban) was awarded 2nd place in the medium sized enterprise category by Turkish Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology Directorate General for Productivity. When he is not busy with optimising flow, he likes to spent quality time with his family. He likes to take pictures with his faithful Nikon D90, meditates with yoga, and likes to throw people off balance in Aikido Dojo. Nothing to be alarmed, his is just a 1st Dan black belt. He has a lot to experience and learn in both areas; work and personal life.

Why Kanban is, Wrongfully, Perceived as a Waterfall Variant

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague about handover points that teams have in their processes and how to decrease them. He was explaining how to approach this problem in the Agile (Scrum) context; by allowing teams self organize around the work that needs to be done and having T-shaped team members, thus, avoiding silo culture. This was not the interesting part of the conversation.

What made this conversation interesting was, he actually wanted to know why Kanban did not care about silo culture; on the contrary, encouraged it. I was a bit shocked but none the less went along with it. I knew his question was sincere and I knew he was in a discussion on this topic with other Agile enthusiasts/evangelists in the work place.

So I asked “Why would you think that Kanban encourages silo culture?” …

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